Just wanted to let everyone know that it has been a tough move – but we’ve moved to Dallas to be closer to the family and the better medical facilities that the metroplex has to offer. I’d like to thank all our friends in East Texas for their thoughts and prayers through this change.

As the tea leaves continue to be read, it looks more and more probable that Kay Bailey Hutchison’s career in politics will be coming to an end soon. The only question is does it happen Tuesday or in April?

At stops across Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison has been making three cases: Rick Perry has ruined Texas, Rick Perry isn’t a Conservative, and Rick Perry has never helped Republicans.

HOGWASH!

Let’s look at how Texas has fared under Rick Perry, because that’s her number one case she has to make in this election: Voters need to fire him because we’re in bad shape. The fact that Texas leads all of the big states in economic growth, limited taxes, a low debt burden, and job creation…this is just a tough pill for Republican voters to have swallowed. I don’t know if this is new to her stump speech, but it is certainly a take on something she said in the debates, and that is we’ve lost jobs under Perry’s watch. Again, a tough sell when you consider the news that’s been out there lately. Start with Facebook, and the jobs that are coming to Texas. Then there is the Canadian mattress and bedding manufacturer that is coming to Wichita Falls, Natura World, who is going to set up its U.S. Headquarters with a $25 million dollar capital investment.

So with the Senator traveling the state saying on one hand we’re in trouble, either before or afterwards in the newscast the voter hears about jobs coming to Texas. Makes the words KBH says just that much more hollow. When national publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, and others say Texas is the model for how thing are to be done…will voters really respect a Senator with a doom and gloom approach to Texas? Apparently not.

Rick Perry isn’t a Conservative is next in her narrative. Why, because he supposedly used stimulus money to balance the budget and that won’t be around in 2011. First, does Senator Hutchison advocate that every tax dollar Texans sends to Washington should stay in Washington? She has commented on how she has been so skillful in getting pork projects…uh federal dollars…to come back to Texas. Again, isn’t this just a wee-bit hypocritical to call out the Governor and use this as his basis for being “not a conservative?” Oh, and she says property taxes are too high and that’s Perry’s fault too. While taxes are indeed to high, the real meat on the bones is the appraisals that homeowners get each year. County governments can say “we’re lowering your tax rate” while at the same time instructing the appraisal districts to increase the value of the home to meet the need to feed government. The homeowner gets a real shallow victory and less in their pocket. Governor Perry, on the other hand, has fought for the cap in appraisals as well as getting the board elected so they at some point have to answer to the people. Senator Hutchison either doesn’t know this (from being in DC for so long) or doesn’t care, either way it shows she is out of touch with the issue.

So, not being able to make the case that Governor Perry has ruined Texas nor being a conservative…she finishes her speech saying only she can save the GOP. Isn’t it just a bit odd to have someone whose race is tearing apart the Texas Republican Party being the one saying she is the one who will unite the Party? Again, this comes from being out of Texas for so long that she doesn’t remember that it was Governor Perry who fought for the Texas GOP in 2003 and we have more Republican members of Congress now because of it.

As they say in baseball, three strikes and (Kay’s) your out.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog – you will know I have written here before that this campaign of Kay’s will go down as one of the worst run in the history of Texas politics. Her only hope now is “we’ll be in the runoff” strategy. How encouraging is it to tell your voters “hey, we can win this in overtime if you will just vote?” Not that much. The Dallas Morning News has an outstanding article (yes sometimes that paper out west can deserve some praise, a blind squirrel finds can find an acorn from time to time) on the rise of Rick Perry and the fall of the Kay Bailey Hutchison campaign and it boils down to this: Kay downplayed the tea party/anger over government and Rick Perry embraced it. A cornerstone of that was the fact that grassroots Republicans, the ones you need in a primary, don’t like pork otherwise known as earmarks and Hutchison is a pork queen. In what could be the biggest blunder in Texas politics, the News writes:

Early in the campaign, the senator and her husband, Ray, met with advisers in their living room discussing possible lines of attack by Perry, a Hutchison ally familiar with the meeting said. Earmarks came up, but Ray Hutchison downplayed the impact.

“Which one of these projects does Rick Perry want to say no to because Kay couldn’t secure federal dollars?” he said.

In an instant, Ray Hutchison may have single handedly ended her wife’s campaign. Understand that Ray’s business is as a bond attorney and benefits from government pork. It hasn’t been a significant part of the campaign, but could explain why he decided to laugh this important issue off.

So while Kay had no desire to embrace an anti-Washington campaign, which would be difficult for someone whose been there for the last sixteen years, Rick Perry ran with it. In Austin and Fort Worth on April 15th, Rick Perry excited the crowds about how Government has grown too big and challenging (before it was popular to do so) Barack Obama.

How all of this translates Tuesday is yet to be known. Does Kay get into the runoff and what happens then? Her campaign is so low on cash and she can’t think she will have any momentum to add to her coffers. If the tally on election night is between 49 and 50%, does she risk alienating even more Republicans? It hasn’t bothered her so far…so one has to think it won’t matter to her how much more she tears down the GOP. To Kay, she’s its saviour when she really is it’s Judas.

The race for the Republican Primary for Governor has come down to this, will Rick Perry get 50%+1 or will Kay Bailey Hutchison get into a runoff and, like the groundhog, have six more weeks of her political career.

“It appears with Debra Medina… stalling, he’s going to get those voters and as I think as we look at the race today, he’s on track to break 50% on Tuesday.” He later added that “The contrast between the two campaigns is so stark and different, I think, that for him to get over half the vote in the Metroplex is not that far off.”

If Kay Bailey Hutchison can’t win her own back yard, which it appears likely she won’t, the result will be pure embarassement.

Go back to the hours after Debra Medina’s self-inflicted campaign implosion on Glenn Beck and on facebook the chatter was “how dare someone from outside of Texas try to influence what we’re doing here.” Well, when you see the very end (please fast forward to the last few seconds) of this video you learn that Medina is recruiting outsiders to come and do poll watching this weekend. Just as a FYI, by the weekend, the polls are closed this weekend and you would think a candidate/campaign would know this but I digress.

Do we want to see a scene like this next Tuesday? Not to say the blank panthers will be out for Debra Medina, but I’ve outlined that her followers are using scare tactics and their rhetoric is at times very scary.

Now also look at the video at the 8:40 mark and hear Medina talk about a global struggle, that the world is watching her race. For someone who, along with her conspiracy theory followers, are floating the crazy Bilderberg New World Order nonsense…she sounds like someone talking about how suddenly is a Worldly Leader? Disturbing stuff….

Now watch the radicals that follow the Governor around…the title of the video is Rick Perry grabs my camera, which never happens…he sandbags the Governor with these loony questions about Bilderberg. In the second video, he accuses the Governor of being a coward…but notice how polite Rick Perry is in how he treats her. The only one being the coward is the man asking the questions, did he identify himself as a Medina Supporter? Did he try to crash a Perry event? Cowards tend to accuse others of what it is they are themselves. Oh, and did you see the Governor run anywhere?

If you haven’t heard the latest, Debra Medina is now in trouble with her own base because she is trying to distance herself from her 9/11 truther beliefs because she knows she has no chance of winning if the public believes the truth about her. As I pointed out on my blog post about the link between Medina and the 9/11 truther movement, her base has been these radical fringe people who think George W. Bush and our Government actually conspired to blow up the WTC. When you look at comments her followers make on the comments pages or facebook, you see how they embraced her immediately following her outing on the Glenn Beck radio show.

Well as people started to hear this, her poll numbers tanked. PPP (which I don’t give a whole lot of validity to) showed that of the people who know about her statements, she gets a whopping 7% and those who don’t know have her in the lead at 33%. That is a wide discrepancy that even her campaign can understand. This has led to her backtracking and going on a very sympathetic Mark Davis Show in Dallas, someone who has been helping Medina on the air and behind the scenes with ties to Tea Party leaders, rejecting the truther movement stronger than at any other time.

Enter Alex Jones, who has turned against his protege’ and removed his support. In this clip, you’ll hear the rantings of Jones and he’ll say at the 7:05 mark of the clip “Debra Medina knows full well that a large part of her grassroots supporters who launched her campaign were 9/11 truthers.”

Understand that this guy Jones believes the Government got the underwear bomber intentionally on the plane, that’s at the 6:38 mark when he sais ” We know the underwear bomber was (the Government doing it) We know the government got the underwear bomber on the plane in Amsterdam, that’s confirmed.”

This is a scary day in Texas Politics. One the one hand, Debra Medina used the truther movement to help propel her from obscurity to nearly overtaking a sixteen year veteran of Washington D.C. When it became known, she quickly turned her back on them and they are not happy. It seems her campaign is now even more wheels off than before – and would be a great story for the main stream media to cover but they are going to ignore this for as long as they can. That one statement by Beck was not the whole story, but one would not know it by the lack of coverage out there.

The good news is she will not overtake Hutchison, the bad news is she may peel off enough votes to put Kay in a runoff.

UPDATE: Alex Jones is not letting up and this can only hurt the fringe candiacy of Debra Medina, her supporters are running around in circles not knowing what to do now….

“48% think the party’s too liberal to 26% who think it’s where it should be ideologically.”

That is something that just jumped out at me in the now “officially” released poll by the PPP. Remember, this is a left-leaning outfit that has mainly done polls for liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood and they’re based out of North Carolina. It’s not Rasmussen.

But for them to include that nearly half of the people they spoke to said they were A) Republicans and B) the Texas GOP was too “liberal” has to make one stop and pause…then ask, “who are they asking?” As someone who has been to every GOP Convention for the last 20 years…I know that it is not a group of Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter Republicans that meet. We may have even coined the term RINO in Texas.

So it does make you question their motives. Right now, what is Kay Bailey Hutchison traveling the state saying? Oh, “this thing is going to go in a runoff.” Then you read ““The better voters have gotten to know Debra Medina the less they’ve liked her,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Her presence in the race may send Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison into a runoff but that’s about it at this point.”

Is this code for, KBH needs you to stop thinking about Medina and start thinking about me as the person you should vote for? Medina has pulled more from Kay than she has Rick – so is PPP carrying the water for the far less conservative member of the two titans? It’s certainly a legitimate question.

Kay Bailey Hutchison has been running ads talking about her recent run of endorsements from the newspapers across Texas. After reading an editorial by William McKenzie of the Dallas Morning News, we now know why the 16 year Senator is racking up these endorsements: they like big Government and feel we need to “pony up bucks” to fix everything. Kay couldn’t agree more after voting for federal bailouts, raising debt limits, and increased federal spending.

“We just finished interviewing a long line of candidates for state legislative offices. What jumped out at me was how many Republican incumbents acknowledged that Texas faces serious problems when it comes to financing transportation projects, future water supplies and even promised property tax cuts. But few would take the next step and admit that we must pony up bucks if we plan to untangle gridlock, provide enough water and lower property tax bills. Their lack of courage is no surprise.”

Liberal newspaper editors want elected officials to spend first while Governor Perry is fighting to limit Government, so it’s no wonder they have chosen to endorse Kay Bailey Hutchison instead. It’s right there in writing, they want someone who will spend first and KBH hasn’t met a spending bill she didn’t like. They look to RINO’s as a vision of courage:

“Fortunately, Republican leaders like state Sen. John Carona will tell the truth. The Dallas legislator has courageously proposed a gas tax hike to pay for our road-building needs. And retiring Sen. Kip Averitt has done his part. The Waco lawmaker has tried to get his colleagues to find a way to pay for Texas’s water plan.”

Remember, Carona was leading the charge for new taxes instead of cutting spending. Averitt is known as a big-spender and his no longer being in the State Senate is a good thing for limitng Government spending.

The fundamental point of this editorial is to say the Tea Party movement is at fault for keeping government from growing. It’s a badge of honor amongst us who believe in limited government, which is the cornerstone of Governor Perry’s campaign. Looking liberals in the eye and saying “NO, WE DON’T HAVE TO SPEND ALL THE MONEY,” …. now THAT’S courage.

This Texan is glad we have a Governor who thinks this way, otherwise we might as well call ourselves California.

The media was quick to jump on a poll released by an outfit called Public Policy Polling or “PPP” back on February 10th that showed a “surging” Debra Medina nearly about to overtake Kay Bailey Hutchison and be in a runoff with Governor Perry. Television outlets where just as quick to point out that PPP was the most accurate polling information in the recent Scott Brown Senate race in Massachusetts.

Tomorrow, that same organization will be the first ones to release a poll following the now infamous coming out of the truther closet by Debra Medina and it doesn’t look good for the radical fringe candidacy from Wharton County. Of those whose who believe, accurately so, that Debra Medina is a truther: 51% are supporting Governor Perry, 30% are supporting Kay Bailey Hutchison, and only 7% are now supporting Medina. The shine has worn off, the ship has sunk, whatever you want to say….but Glenn Beck was nearly right when he said “fastest way back to 4%” after the interview. Now amongst the truther crowd, Medina does well by getting 33% to 32% for Hutchison and 29% for Perry. Bad news for Medina is this will clearly tell the independent and undecideds that her base is the truther movement and they will quickly leave her camp in droves…driving the overall numbers even lower.

Chatter on facebook and twitter, or on comment postings as I spoke about in another post, show that the truther movement is a loud but small group of people and they are sticking by her side. This is not a blessing because it simply reinforces the fact that she is a truther.

For Perry, this poll is even better news. PPP is a liberal polling outfit, conducting polling for Planned Parenthood and North Carolina Democratic leaning organizations. If they are showing Perry with more than the magical 50%, one can only assume that he is polling even higher amongst true conservatives.

The question then becomes will this new poll get as much public attention from the media as the one on February 10th? Will the media die by the same sword they lived by back a few weeks ago? The narrative has been, seeking opinion from liberal political science professors from SMU, UT, TCU, etc., that incumbents get only what they poll – that this thing is clearly headed for a runoff. They didn’t take into consideration the Texas Credit Union poll that showed Perry at 49% (adding in the +/- and he was over the 50% mark) because it didn’t fit what they wanted to be the picture they are trying to paint – which is why I will wager tomorrow’s poll doesn’t garner the same spotlight. Media in Texas want this to go into OT (a runoff) because it gives them A) more ad revenue from a longer campaign and B) more news coverage to focus on.

Debra Medina is at it again, saying the choice made by the man who flew an airplane into an Austin building is reflective of “the hopelessness many in our society feel,” adding “There is a sense in all of our country that we are not on the right path. That’s why this race is so important.”

That is why her race for Governor is so important, to allow nutty conspiracy theories to continue and to redirect the blame to the Government and away from a man who deserves no defense. The problem with her comments, even when she says “You cannot excuse that kind of behavior,” it gives hope to radicals she continues not do disavow.

“History will hopefully show this not as an act of cowardice or terrorism, but as the start of our society finally saying enough is enough. Medina was right when she stated that this was an act of an individual that had nothing left to lose. A man that had been beaten down by the very system that we are supposed to have a say in. A system that no longer values the individual, but rather those with the most money. All I can say is too bad he didn’t take out all 199 IRS agents, Let the fight begin!”

Seriously, this guy who goes by Keith is calling for the death of federal employees and telling us all that Medina believes this too…”Medina was right,” he says. Dawn tells the world, ” someone else mentioned innocent people just doing their jobs. I guess those innocent IRS agents had nothing in common with the guards in the Nazi prison camps who were also “innocent people just doing their jobs”. They also were not in themselves “The System”, but only its employees. Putting someone in an oven is not the only means of total destruction of a person.”

This from someone called Mark, “At first I thought Al-Qaeda was bad. But, I thought about why they did 911. I realized that America supports corrupt Saudi monarchy and Al-Qaeda wants to free their citizens from the tyranny. So, even though destroying 2 towers and killing innocent people is bad, I consider them heroes.” Heroes, really Mark? Al-Queda wants to free their citizens from tryanny…wow if he honestly believes this and supports Debra Medina, that says a lot about her candidacy.

Secondarily, it gives the left a chance to paint tea parties with a broad brush, something those who are genuinely upset over the over-reaching government President Obama is pushing a black eye. “Like Medina and the other Tea Partiers, here is a man who never grew up and faced his responsibilities: got caught cheating on his taxes, so instead of accepting the blame, he blames some one else and kills innocent people. That Medina sympathizes with this murderer is telling. If people know some of these sick ‘tea partiers’ and they start to whine, remind them that if they turn to violence they will be dealt like any other criminal. I certainly hope authorities are at these ‘Tea Party’ rallies and taking names. Almost all of these Tea Party people are Republicans who voted for those who have done so much to destroy our economy. Now, like spoiled children, they don’t want to accept responsibility for their terrible judgment.,” says joe I. Big Al adds, “This was the act of a conservative tea-party terrorist.”

Ronald Reagan once passionately spoke about a shining city on a hill in describing his enthusiasm of America, his belief in that America had greatness in her. Its roots is from the The Gospel of Matthew, 5:14-16, which reads, “You are the light of the world, a city set on a hill cannot be hid.”

A week from Tuesday at 7pm, the polls will officially close meaning no more (legal) votes will be cast for the Republican nomination for Governor of Texas. It will also close a chapter in Texas Republican history where the goal of two were to tear down rather than build up…talking not of a “shining city on a hill” but more of a rhetorical message of doom.

Over the course of the last four years, when you think about it, Kay Bailey Hutchison has been a purveyor of gloom rather than a recognizer of good when it comes to Texas. To understand what has taken place, you must first understand how we got here. Hutchison was the Texas State Treasurer (a position that no longer exists) who immediately got herself in trouble with an indictment and stories of being less than a warm person to be around. It was this scandal that led her to change focus away from the Governor’s mansion and towards Washington D.C. To her credit, she has been one of the strongest vote getters in the Republican Party only because her opponents have been…well…less than stellar. Richard Fisher, Gene Kelly, and Barbara Ann Radnofsky are not what you would call Democratic Party heavyweights. Popularity, in her case, came from never having to work to get elected.

Moving to today, it is clear that Senator Hutchison has decided to try to paint a picture of gloom and doom for Texas that we cannot survive as a state without her swooping and becoming Governor. If her campaign is a measure of how effective of a Governor she’ll be, only then do we have a true gloom and doom scenario playing out in the Lone Star State.

In a recent interview, Kay Bailey Hutchison made some incredible remarks that only reinforce this “without me, we’re going nowhere” type of attitude:

When asked about jobs and the economy being the top issue on the mind of voters, does she regret making her campaign one of attacks against Governor Perry rather than putting forth a clear plan of her own on how to grow jobs in Texas, she had an stunningly out of touch answer to the question. Now consider, just for a moment, that Texas is #1 is job creation. We’ve created more jobs in our state than all other 49 states combined. Our unemployment rate is lower than every other major state in America…so this would be a tough sell to voters. The Senator’s response was we’re not going to create jobs in Texas while he is in office because he has created an anti-business climate and that property taxes have gone up. Neither of those boats will float when you consider business are already moving here and the Governor has been out in front of capping appraisal values, the real culprit in the tax burdens of homeowners in Texas.

The topic then moved to Hutchison portrayal as being more Washington than Texas, something that has limited her campaign and kept her at a disadvantage. The answer again was as if no one had been paying attention to reality, instead saying she has been there everyday fighting against government-run healthcare and stimulus packages. Again, the facts don’t match the rhetoric. Her vote that helped expedite the healthcare debate and deciding to increase debt and spending has given her zero credibility to make these kind of claims…plus, she has one of the worst voting records in the Senate to boot. Saying she is up there everyday fighting is like saying Tiger Woods was being faithful to his wife – we know it just isn’t true. Sadly, she was even arrogant enough to say that she deserved praise for being there to fight for Texas values and Texas tax dollars. Hmmm, when we have seen no significant increase in the money we sent to DC coming back to us during her term in office…that message has no merit.

Term limits…the Senator wants to own this issue but again, we have a credibility gap. Saying you are for congressional term limits when you violated your own promise to stay in the Senate for just two terms leads one to have a reasonable doubt as to you keeping your own word. It wasn’t a law, it was a campaign promise. One that now she says she there were issues she needed to work on? What, voting for bailouts and increasing the debt load on Americans?

And the cherry on top of the Sunday was we saying we had a balanced Federal Budget during the beginning of her term and only 9/11 caused the issue to go in the red. Really? So would that same logic apply to Texas’ need to increase its own homeland security budget, efforts to strengthen the border, keeping us safe here at home? First of all, there hasn’t been a balanced Federal Budget since 1957. Second, she praised George W. Bush for having a 3.3% growth rate but failed to understand that Governor Perry has kept the growth rate to just 1.6%. Isn’t that twice as good as the man she praised?

Kay Bailey Hutchison’s hope is that she can somehow squeak into a runoff, which seems less likely as every day goes by. The strategy then becomes Governor Perry is not good for the Republican Party. However, that’s a loosing issue for Kay when you look back at redistricting and endorsements members of the state’s Republican executive committee as well as past and present chairmen of the party.

Hutchison is not someone can look to for inspiration, for projecting strentgh…but someone who has fallen into the Democratic gloom and doom approach one would expect after sixteen years in Washington. She’ll be returning to the Senate after the primary…the only question is for a few months or till 2012 or beyond. The good news is, she will not be taking Texas down the road that Washington has taken America because Republicans will be rejecting her rhetoric after looking at her record.